Every ad platform reports its own contribution generously. Add up what Meta, TikTok and Google each claim and the total is often 30% to 80% more than the revenue your store actually took. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the reason two sensible people can look at the same month and disagree about whether it was good — and at a small budget, one wrong call can cost a quarter's growth.
Meta claims 3.1x. TikTok claims 2.2x. Google, if you run it, claims many of the same orders again. The founder divides total revenue by total ad spend, gets 1.7x, and has to decide whether to spend more next month without knowing which of those numbers to believe. The instinct is to pick whichever figure supports the decision already made. For a small DTC brand the trouble usually starts lower down: a pixel firing twice on the thank-you page, purchases tracked only in the browser so a fifth or more never reach the platform, or a theme update that quietly broke the checkout event weeks ago. Before anyone argues about attribution, the events themselves have to be right.
Every engagement starts with the ads audit, and the pixel is part of it: do purchase events fire once, with the right value and currency, and are the add-to-cart and checkout events there at all? We place a real test order and follow it end to end. On Starter and Growth you get the fixes as a step-by-step list your developer or store app can follow; most take an hour or less.
On Scale we set up the Conversions API on Meta and the equivalent on TikTok, with event IDs matched against the browser pixel so nothing is counted twice. Usually that means configuring your store's native integration properly rather than building anything custom. We then track event match quality as a standing number in the monthly report, not a box ticked once at setup, because a poorly matched account is optimizing on bad information every hour of every day.
Before the first month starts we agree the one number the engagement is judged on — usually total store revenue, or new-customer revenue, over total ad spend — and write down exactly how each part is calculated. Platform ROAS stays in the report as a directional signal for day-to-day decisions, clearly labeled as such. Disagreements after that are about strategy, which is a far more useful argument to have.
One report a month, with the blended number at the top, platform detail beneath it, definitions written on the page, and a short note on what changed and why. If you already run a post-purchase 'how did you hear about us' survey, we read it alongside. When a number moves, the report is where you find out why before you have to ask.
Account management on one to three platforms, a fixed creative test cycle, and one clear decision each month about where the next dollar goes.
Static and short-video ads made from your footage and product photos, briefed from what the account has already learned.
Start with the one-week ads audit. We will tell you what we would change in the first month, and the $160 is credited against it if you continue.
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